D700 or Gemini 12?

When you print a lot of A4 and smaller prints, you might be tempted to look at purchasing a printer like the Epson D700 instead of using Gemini 12. Although the low costs per print of the D700 may sound great, there are a few things you should take into account to make a complete comparison:

Investments

One of the key advantages of Gemini 12 is no up front investments.You only pay after you have printed. In practise, you can have the money you charge for print on your account before you get charged for printing them on your Gemini system.
When you buy a D700 it’s a different story: you have to purchase the printer and a Rip to drive it, and if you want to make a fair comparison, you should also include a cover plus service contract on it, so you at least have some hardware warranty for 3 years.
When you add these costs up it is about 3400 Euro’s for three years. So that is 94 Euro per month (Although you have to cough up the full 3400 before you can make your first print). Then you will need paper and ink, which would be more up front costs.

Durability

The D700 is a dye based inkjet printer. What does that mean? Dye based inks fade much much faster than pigmented inks. You can compare Dye based ink to water, with a dye solution in it. like sugar dissolves in tea. Pigmented ink is more like water with pigment particles floating in it. Like sand floats in water when stirred. So the layer of actual color using a Dye based ink is very thin. Using a pigmented ink, the pigments create a layer that is much thicker than Dye, which makes it much more durable. Dye based prints can fade within weeks. Pigmented ink based prints can maintain color for many decades.

Quality

The D700 is a fast printer, with a fan to prevent the head from overheating. By definition, the D700 is not consistent in its colors: when it warms up more, it prints more color. So a run of 25 prints can have a noticeable color difference between the first and the last print.
Black and white prints on a D700 are a challenge: with only 1 black and no grey, the D700 produces grey by printing lower densities of cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta and yellow. As soon as the color balance between these five colors is less than perfect, one or more color casts will show.
When that happens, you need to create a new ICC profile on your D700, which requires either 2000 Euro worth of equipment or hiring someone to make you a new ICC profile, which usually costs more than 100 Euro each time. With Gemini 12, Black and white prints are printed using black and grey inks, making it much easier to print neutral black and white. In case you do see that the color balance isn’t as good as it was at installation, Gemini will create a new ICC profile for you.

Service

When you buy a D700 and Rip, you are going to have to support yourself: whenever something does not work the way you expect, there is no service organisation to guide you to a solution. Gemini customers receive excellent one on one support, if needed through TeamViewer, which enables us to actually show you on your screen how to do what you would like to achieve.

Flexibility

The D700 prints on photo paper at a maximum of 210mm. Full stop. No canvas, no fine art, no A3 or larger prints.
With Gemini 12, you will be able to print up to A2 by default, on a variety of print media. And when that is not big enough, our Remote Printing enables prints up to 64″ wide.

Conclusion

We fully understand the concept of low costs per print is appealing.
But when taking all things into consideration, the D700 is a fairly limited product,
offering lower quality and durability, making you responsible for colors, up front costs and support.
Gemini 12 only charges you after you have already printed and sold your prints and will provide support in case you cannot get the results you want.